Revolutionizing Enterprise Storage with Adaptive Flash

June 11, 2014

When Nimble Storage was founded in 2008, we believed we could transform the world of storage by leveraging two key external disruptions: Flash and cloud connectivity. We came to market with two core innovations. The first is CASL™, our flash-optimized file system. The second is InfoSight™, our cloud-based management platform.

Our mission is simple: Give customers the most efficient flash storage platform in the industry. Today’s launch is an important step toward fulfilling our mission, further extending our leadership in the flash storage era.

What Customers Want

Within their data centers, customers have hundreds of workloads that require storage. Some applications need exceptionally high-performance and low latency access to data; others demands lots of cost-effective capacity, and many need a blend of both within a cost envelope. More importantly, application needs are rarely static; they can be expected to vary significantly over time.

The industry has asked customers to segment their infrastructure into flash-only arrays for high-performance applications, nearline arrays for capacity-intensive applications, and hybrid arrays for mainstream applications. That’s resulted in storage environments that are expensive, difficult to manage, and unresponsive to change.

What customers want is a single architecture that can satisfy the changing needs of their business-critical applications. They want performance, capacity and scalability in solutions that are flexible, easy-to-manage and affordable.

The Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash Platform

Our Adaptive Flash platform spans a broad spectrum of workloads

The Adaptive Flash platform delivers performance comparable to that of all-flash arrays, but at a far better price point.

At the same time, Adaptive Flash stacks up against the best hybrid arrays sold by the largest incumbents in our industry in petabyte-scale deployments for mainstream enterprise applications. In these deployments, Adaptive Flash extends our price-performance advantage; while at the same time delivering lower capacity costs and industry-leading data management.

How Did We Do It?

Efficiency was one of key goals when we designed CASL, our cache-accelerated sequential layout architecture. We wanted to create storage systems that leveraged the strengths of flash and low-cost, high-density disk drives, while avoiding their weaknesses. Our second objective was flexibility: We wanted the ratio of flash-to-disk to be able to adapt as flash and disk evolve, and as customer needs change.

Adaptive Flash allows customers to intelligently scale and dynamically allocate storage resources within a storage system. It is the foundation for the products we’re introducing today: The CS700, a high-end controller, CS700, which delivers as many as a half a million IOPS, and an all-flash shelf that allows customers to start small and non-disruptively scale to 64TB of flash within a single system.

I thank you for your interest in Nimble Storage. We believe that we have built the industry’s most advanced flash storage platform, and that we have the opportunity to lead the industry as it transitions towards flash-optimized storage. The platform capabilities we are introducing today are a key step towards that goal. Please visit our website to learn more about Nimble’s Adaptive Flash platform.